“It’s always the same response but your emotional toll was heightened when there is children involved.”

The couple had left their car near Dease Lake with a note in it saying they’d gone looking for gas, and police say it may have been there for up to 10 days. The pair had crossed the border into Canada on June 9 in the southeast, near Fernie.

On Thursday, the RCMP said they have concluded the family was headed to Alaska and planned to do some camping along the way but “underestimated the vastness of northern B.C., such as the distances between services and were not adequately prepared.”

It says the family is being supported by partner agencies, and no criminal investigation is open.

The Ministry of Children and Family Development declined to say if it was looking into the incident, saying it cannot comment on specific cases.

Lesaca’s mother Michelle Burnside.

Michelle Burnside / Facebook

“When I found out they were in trouble, it really hurts, and you know all I did was pray,” Lesaca’s mother Michelle Burnside told Global News.

“I wasn’t able to sleep, just crying, worried, because when they left I didn’t know where they [were].”

Both Burnside and Jeffrey’s father Rhet Phan say they can’t figure out what the couple were doing so far north, and that they have no relatives in Canada or Alaska.

Burnside said Phan doesn’t have a job and her daughter had recently quit hers, and she questioned whether they were trying to go somewhere to find a fresh start.

Troubling signs?

But she said there were troubling signs in the month leading up to their disappearance

She said an early indication that something was wrong was when the couple missed a scheduled flight to the Philippines in late May.

“Jeffrey’s father called me and said there’s a problem because they went to the airport, they cancelled the flight, and then the airport is calling here that they left their luggage there,” she said.

Burnside said there were other warning signs, including the family starting to get rid of all of its possessions.

“They started selling everything — their furniture, everything that they own, they start[ed] selling it on Facebook,” Burnside said. “They said, ‘Oh no, we’re just trying to get rid of stuff, and you know we’re going to move out.'”

“I don’t know what’s going on. They are running away from something? They’re in trouble? We’re thinking all of these things. But I was wondering, why did they take their kids with them?”